Present Music celebrates composer Ince at Wilson Center

Present Music celebrated its 20-year-plus relationship with composer Kamran Ince on Saturday with a concert dedicated entirely to his work.

Kevin Stalheim, artistic director of the new-music ensemble, joked that Ince is "kind of like a brother to me, including all the bad stuff," but any differences were worked out well before the concert at the Wilson Center for the Arts in Brookfield.

Ince, a Turkish-American composer, can conjure up distant mountains and sinuous Eastern melismas with the best of them, particularly in "Asumani," a duet for cello and ney, a breathy-sounding Turkish wind instrument. Cellist Peter Thomas, who keeps a full schedule of nontraditional gigs, was a good choice to explore this exotic sound world in partnership with Mehmet Ali Sanlikol on the ney. (Sanlikol also presented two solo Turkish pieces: one sung, one played on the zurna, which sounds like its name.)

In larger ensembles, Ince's Western side showed through a little more. "Zamboturfidir" and "Two-Step Passion" both used repeated ostinato figures, fragments of melody that repeat endlessly with small but intriguing variations, and intensely rhythmic sections set off by wispy, ethereal sounds.

In the remarkable "Dreamlines," musicians had to speak several lines of Turkish text, and also sing wordless melodies while playing their instruments. The overall effect was a long, slow crescendo of tranquil gestures up to a luminous final major chord.

Ince conducted with much more animation than I remember from his previous appearance with Present Music for his opera "The Judgment of Midas." On Saturday, he looked like a loose-jointed marionette as he urged the musicians onward.

The program opened with "Partita in E" for violin and percussion, operating on the far edge of Ince's tendency to assemble random fragments. Violinist Eric Segnitz handled the technical demands easily, including almost constant double stops (playing two notes at once). Percussionist Carl Storniolo partnered with Segnitz on many instruments and on many John Cage-like blocks of silence.

Present Music's first-ever concert at the Wilson Center drew a decent crowd, but it skewed older. The good sprinkling of hipsters who usually attend the ensemble's downtown concerts apparently chose not to drive to Brookfield.